Many Americans will be introducing more food than usual to their GI tracts on this Thanksgiving Day, and so I thought I’d provide you with a special gastroenterology-related post to complement the mood. If you have already eaten, I might suggest that you come back to this post on an empty stomach. I will be discussing the alternative medicine practice known as “fecal transplantation” and it is rather unsavory.

The idea of transferring stool from one person to another (for the treatment of various GI disorders) was first described in the 1950s. This month the TV show, Grey’s Anatomy, featured the practice in one of their plot lines – which rekindled interest in the therapy, and resulted in an explosion of search engine activity. I figured it was probably my duty, as a member of Science Based Medicine, to offer a rational analysis of the treatment in the hope that the Google gods will serve up my post to a few of the information-seekers out there. I hope to reach them before the snake oil salesmen, wrapped in their mantle of “gentle, natural cures,” convince them that they desperately need a good colon or liver cleanse, if not a fecal transplant.

Like most alternative therapies, fecal transplantation is based on a drop of truth and a gallon of pseudoscience. It is true that the gastrointestinal tract is teeming with hundreds of thousands of bacterial species and pseudo-species, and that without them we would die. It is also true that certain nasty bugs (like clostridium difficile) cause problems when they take up residence within the gut. Antibiotics do upset intestinal flora, much to the consternation of infectious disease specialists. Now, all that being said – the practice of repopulating the gut with another person’s stool requires some fairly grand assumptions about efficacy and safety that are not founded upon any clinical trial data whatsoever.(more…)